The Internet is the greatest free-market
innovation in history. It has changed the way we live, the way we play,
the way we work,
the way we learn, the way we speak.

During my time at the FCC, I’ve met with
entrepreneurs in South Dakota who have started businesses. I've met with doctors
in Ohio who helped care
for patients. I've met with teachers in Alaska who have educated their students.
I've met with farmers in Missouri who
increased their crop yields. And I've met with many more who have
succeeded all because of the Internet.

And the
Internet has enriched my own life immeasurably. In the past few days alone,
I have set up a FaceTime call with my parents and kids.
I've downloaded interesting podcasts about blockchain technology. I've
ordered a burrito. I've managed my playoff-bound fantasy football team.
And, as many of you might have seen,
I've tweeted.

What is responsible for the phenomenal
development of the Internet? Well, it certainly wasn’t heavy-handed
government regulation. Quite to the contrary: At the dawn of the
commercial Internet, President Clinton and a Republican Congress agreed
that it would be the policy of the United States to (and I quote) "preserve the
vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the
Internet...unfettered by Federal [or] State regulation.”1

This bipartisan policy worked. Encouraged
by light-touch regulation, America's private sector invested over 1.5
trillion dollars to build out fixed and mobile networks throughout the United
States. 28.8k modems gave way to gigabit fiber. Innovators
and entrepreneurs grew startups into global giants. And America’s Internet
economy became the envy of the entire world.

And this light-touch approach was good for
consumers, too. In a free market full of permissionless innovation,
online services blossomed. Within a generation, we have gone from email
as the killer app to high-definition video streaming. Entrepreneurs and
innovators guided the Internet far better than the clumsy hand of
government ever could have.

But then,
in early 2015, the FCC,
under political pressure,
jettisoned this successful, bipartisan approach to the Internet. On
express orders from the previous White House, the FCC scrapped the
tried-and-true, light touch regulation of the Internet and replaced it
with heavy-handed micromanagement. It decided to subject the Internet
to utility-style regulation designed in the 1930s to govern Ma Bell.

This decision was a mistake. For one
thing, there was no problem to solve. The Internet wasn’t broken in
2015. We were not living in some digital dystopia. To the contrary, the
Internet is on thing -- perhaps the only thing -- in American society
that we can all agree
has been a stunning success.

Not only was there no problem, this
“solution” hasn’t worked. The main complaint consumers have about the
Internet is not and has never been that their Internet service provider
is blocking access to content. It’s that they don’t have access at all,
or not enough competition. These regulations have ironically taken us in the opposite
direction from these consumer preferences. Under Title II, investment
in high-speed networks has declined by billions of dollars. Notably,
this is the first time that such investment has declined outside of a
recession in the Internet era. When there is less investment, that means
fewer next-generation's networks are built. That means less access
and less competition.
That means fewer jobs for Americans building those networks. And that
means more Americans are stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Now, the impact has been particularly serious
for smaller Internet service providers. They don’t have the time,
the money, or the lawyers to navigate a thicket of complex rules.
Now, they don't get a lot of press, certainly not here in Washington.

...incurred additional expense in complying with the Title
II rules, had delayed or reduced network expansion, had delayed or
reduced services and had allocated budget to comply with the rules.

Other small companies, too, have told the FCC that these regulations
have forced them to cancel, delay, or curtail fiber network upgrades.
And nearly two dozen small providers submitted a letter saying that the FCC’s
heavy-handed rules “affect our ability to find financing.” Now remember,
these are not the big guys. These are small companies, the kinds of companies that are critical to providing a more
competitive marketplace.

Now, these rules have also impeded innovation.
One major company, for instance, reported that it put on hold a project
to build out its out-of-home Wi-Fi network due to uncertainty about the
FCC’s regulatory stance. And a coalition of 19 municipal Internet
service providers -- that is, city-government-owned nonprofits -- have told the FCC that
they (and I quote)

...often delay or hold off from rolling out a new feature or service
because [they] cannot afford to deal with a potential complaint and
enforcement action.

None of this is good for consumers. We
need to empower all Americans with digital opportunity, not deny them
the benefits of greater access and competition.

And consider too that these are just the
effects that these rules have had on the Internet of today. Think about how
they will affect the Internet we need ten, twenty years from now. The
digital world bears no resemblance to a water pipe or an electric line or
a sewer. Use of those pipes will be roughly constant over time, and very
few would say that there’s been dramatic innovation in these areas.

By
contrast, online traffic is exploding, and we consume exponentially more
traffic -- and data over time. With the dawn of the
Internet of Things, with the
development of high bit-rate applications like virtual reality, with new
activities that we can't fully grasp yet -- like high-volume bitcoin mining
-- we are imposing ever more demands on the network. And over time,
that means our networks themselves will need to scale, too.

But they don’t have to. If our rules
deter the massive infrastructure investment that we need, eventually
we’ll pay the price in terms of less innovation. Consider these words
from Ben Thompson, a highly-respected technology analyst, from a post on
his blog Stratechery supporting my proposal.
It's an extended quote, but with your indulgence -- it's important:

The question that must
be grappled with...is whether or not the Internet is ‘done.’ By
that I mean that today’s bandwidth is all we [will] [[ever]] need, which means we
can risk chilling investment through prophylactic regulation and the
elimination of price signals that may spur infrastructure build-out....

If we are “done”, then
the potential harm of a Title II reclassification is much lower; sure,
ISPs will have to do more paperwork, but honestly, they’re just a bunch
of mean monopolists anyways, right? Best to get laws in place to
preserve what we have.

But what if we aren’t done? What if
virtual reality with dual 8k displays actually becomes something
meaningful? What if those imagined remote medicine applications are
actually developed? What if the Internet of Things moves beyond this
messy experimentation phase and into real-time value generation, not
just in the home but in all kinds of unimagined commercial
applications? I certainly hope we will have the bandwidth to support
all of that!2

I do, too. And as Thompson put it in
another Stratechery post, and again I quote:

The
fact of the matter is there is no evidence that harm exists in the sort
of systematic way that justifies heavily regulating ISPs; the evidence...does
[exist] that current regulatory structures handle bad
actors perfectly well. The only future to fear is the one we never
discover because we gave up on the approach that [has already] brought us
so far.3

Now, remember, folks, networks don’t have to be
built. Risks don’t have to be taken. Capital doesn’t have to be
raised. The costs of Title II today may appear, at least to some, to be
hidden. But the consumers and innovators of tomorrow will pay a severe
price.

So what is the FCC doing today?
Well, quite
simply, we are restoring the light-touch framework that has governed the
Internet for most of its existence. We are moving
from Title II to Title
I. Wonkier it cannot be.

It is difficult to match that mundane
reality to the apocalyptic rhetoric that we have heard from Title II
supporters. And as the debate has gone on, their claims have gotten
more and more outlandish. So let’s be clear. Returning to the legal
framework that governed the Internet from
President Clinton’s
pronouncement in 1996 until 2015 is not going to destroy the Internet.
It is not going to end the Internet as we know it. It is not going to
kill democracy. It is not going to stifle free expression online. If
stating these propositions alone doesn’t demonstrate their absurdity,
our Internet experience before 2015, and our experience tomorrow, once
this order passes, will prove them so.

Simply put, by returning to the
light-touch Title I framework, we are helping consumers and promoting
competition. Broadband providers will have stronger incentives to build
networks, especially in unserved areas, and to upgrade networks to
gigabit speeds and 5G. This means there will be more competition among
broadband providers. It also means more ways that startups and tech
giants alike can deliver applications and content to more users. In
short, it is a freer and more open Internet.

And we also promote much more robust
transparency among ISPs than existed three years ago. We require ISPs
to disclose a variety of business practices, and the failure to do so
subjects them to enforcement action. This transparency rule4 will ensure
that consumers know what they’re buying and startups get the information
they need as they develop new products and services.

Moreover, we empower the Federal Trade
Commission to ensure that consumers and competition are protected. Two
years ago, the Title II Order stripped the FTC of
jurisdiction over broadband providers. But today, we are putting
the
nation’s premier consumer protection cop back on the beat. The FTC will
once again have the authority to take action against Internet service
providers that engage in [anti]competitive, unfair, or deceptive acts. As
-- As FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausenrecently
said, and I quote:

The FTC’s ability to protect consumers and promote competition in
the broadband industry isn’t something new and far-fetched. We have a
long-established role in preserving the values that consumers care about
online.5

...the plan to restore FTC jurisdiction is good for
consumers....[T]he sky isn’t falling. Consumers will remain
protected, and the [I]nternet will continue to thrive.6

So let’s be clear. Following
today’s vote, Americans will still be able to access the websites they
want to visit. They will still be able to enjoy the services they want
to enjoy. There will still be cops on the beat guarding a free and open
Internet. This is the way things were prior to 2015, and this is the
way they will be once again.

Now, our decision today will also return
regulatory parity to the Internet economy. Now, some Silicon Valley
platforms giants [sic] favor imposing heavy-handed regulations on other parts of the
Internet ecosystem. But all too often, they don’t practice what they
preach. Edge providers regularly block content that they don’t like.
When you go online do you decide what news, search results, and products you
see? Perhaps not. They regularly provide what you see and, perhaps more
importantly, what you don't. And many thrive on
the business model of charging to place content in front of eyeballs.
What else is “Accelerated Mobile Pages” or promoted tweets but
prioritization?

What is worse, there is no transparency
into how decisions that appear inconsistent with an open Internet are
made. How does a company decide to restrict someone's account, or
block their tweets because they think their views are "inflammatory" or
wrong. How does a company decide to demonetize videos
from political advocates without any notice? How does a company expressly
block access to websites on rival devices or prevent dissidents’ content
from appearing on its platform? How does a company decide to
block from
its app store a cigar aficionado app, apparently because the company
perceives that the app promotes tobacco use? You don’t have any insight
into any of these decisions, and neither do I. Yet these are very real,
actual threats to an open Internet -- ironic coming from the very entities
that claim to support it. Ironic, too, that so-called net neutrality
advocates most vigorously opposed to our reforms have little-to-nothing
to say about these threats. These are omissions -- These are threats
that a growing number of officials, Democrats and Republican [sic],
House and Senate, are beginning to take notice of.

Now, look -- perhaps certain companies support
saddling broadband providers with heavy-handed regulations because those
rules work to their economic advantage. I don’t blame them for taking
that position. And I’m not saying that these same rules should be
slapped on them too. What I am saying is that it is not the
job of the government
to be in the business of picking winners and losers in the
Internet economy. We should have a level playing field and let
consumers decide who prevails.

Now, many words have been spoken during this
debate but the time has come for action. It is time for the Internet
once again to be driven by engineers and entrepreneurs and consumers,
rather than lawyers and accountants and bureaucrats. It is time for us
to act to bring faster, better, and cheaper Internet access to all
Americans. It is time for us to return to the bipartisan regulatory
framework under which the Internet flourished prior to 2015. It is time
for us to restore Internet freedom.

4 "The Restoring Internet
Freedom Order requires an ISP to publicly disclose network
management practices, performance, and commercial terms of its
broadband internet access service sufficient to enable consumers
to make informed choices regarding the purchase and use of such
services, and entrepreneurs and other small businesses to
develop, market, and maintain internet offerings. As part of
these disclosures, the rule requires ISPs to disclose their
congestion management, application-specific behavior, device
attachment rules, and security practices, as well as any
blocking, throttling, affiliated prioritization, or paid
prioritization in which they engage. The rule also requires ISPs
to disclose performance characteristics, including a service
description and the impact of non-broadband internet access
services data services. Finally, the rule requires ISPs to
disclose the price of the service, privacy policies, and redress
options. The rule requires ISPs to make such disclosure
available either via a publicly available, easily accessible
website or through transmittal to the Commission, which will
make such disclosures available via a publicly available, easily
accessible website. The information collection will assist the
Commission in its statutory obligation to report to Congress on
market entry barriers in the telecommunications market. The
Commission anticipates that the revised disclosures will empower
consumers and businesses with information about their broadband
internet access service, protecting the openness of the
internet. Although this collection was bifurcated in 2016 with
respect to fixed and mobile ISPs, the Commission seeks to have
this collection encompass both fixed and mobile ISPs." [Source:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/03/28/2018-06181/information-collection-being-submitted-for-review-and-approval-to-the-office-of-management-and]

5 Maureen Ohlhausen. "Putting the FTC cop back
on the beat.": Remarks at the Future of Internet Freedom (Nov 28, 2017).

Audio Note: Edited out remarks pertaining to the security
recess (save for initial comment), as well as remarks immediately subsequent to the recess which
replicated the entire paragraph delivered just prior to the recess. All
other content preserved in full.